AMY OF HULL BLOWS IN

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 122, 26 May 1930, Page 8

AMY OF HULL BLOWS IN

We know now, from the cablegrams, that the girl who Hew solo from England to Australia •in a Moth 'plane is the product of a refined, well-to-do home, and of a Yorkshire university. She is not a professional popularity-hunter nor a feminine acrobat with business interests behind her action. She did not imbibe hardihood as a circus artist, nor cultivate boldness in the back-of-stage atmosphere which the American talking pictures delight to glorify. She was just a girl in the Yorkshire seaport of Hull, daughter of a man who had business interests in t St. Andrew's Dock, and who evidently could have maintained her, had she wished, in the usual up-to-date idleness of cards and cocktails. That she graduated at Sheffield University, that she then united culture with mechanics, and took a course not only in flying but in ground engineering, is sufficient evidence that she belonged to the constructive side of the new womanhood, and was not afraid to face the dirty work of flying as well as its thrills. And to that realism was clearly united a splendid idealism expressing itself in the faith that can fly over mountains if it cannot remove them. The way (airway) to Australia was no little perilous, but the will was there. The trail had been blazed—at first by the long experienced, more lately by the lesser experienced—but never by a woman. Here was a world to conquer. Miss Amy Johnson has conquered it. This flight is the greatest thing to date in air-womanship. It is one of the greatest in the history of Empire flying. We are not aware that it 'has added much to scientific knowledge. Perhaps it has not. Perhaps, also, there has been an element of luck. But, whatever , discounts may be due under that head to solo world-flights in Moths or light machines, the fact remains that what flying most needs to-day is not a stimulus to scientific development but a wider popular .urge. Scientific investigation, with or without women fliers, is well under way, and it is not likely to stop. What pauses is airmindedness —the state of mind that regards flying as a practice created for mankind, not as something in or above the clouds. It .-is in this field of popular psychology, and particularly in the Empire section of that field, that Miss Johnson's feat _so heavily scores. The public mind does not grasp the technical side of aeronautic progress; it does not catch on to "slotted wings," etc., so much as it does to the recorded "crashes"; but the public mind does jump to an England-Australia solo flight, and by a woman.' To miss your destination, to find another in the dusk, to have a bump, to survive, to come right through—all this has a new meaning when performed by a young girl graduate possessing no particular strength except a strong will. We think that Sir Alan Cobham, who has done so much himself to appeal to (he people, strikes the keynote when he observes:

The man in the street will . say: "There must .foe something-in this flying business if a girl, single-handed, flies a small piano half across the world." That apathy of which the British Air League complains has received a blow. And even if imitation removes the bloom, even if other girl i fliers should rise or fall, the blow was needed, and has been magnifificently driven home.